And what hands: Buddha hands that know how to sleep, that lie down smoothly after all has passed, with fingers adjoining, to rest for centuries at the edge of a lap, lying with the palms facing up, or else steeply raised at the wrist, invoking infinite stillness.
Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke
Rilke describes his visit to the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, to see Rodin’s drawings. Here is the first part of this description.
He mentions “the dancing girls of King Sisowath”, a troupe of Cambodian dancers who accompanied King Sisowath during his 1906 visit to France. Rodin attended their performance in the Pré-Catelan, Paris on July 10, 1906, and then followed them to Marseilles (they left the country on July 20)
October 15, 1907 (Part 2)
Click the image for details and to zoom in (on Rodin Museum site)
There were about fifteen new sheets which I found scattered among the others, all from the time when Rodin followed the dancing girls of King Sisowath on their tour so as to be able to admire them longer and better. <…>
There they were, these small graceful dancers, like transformed gazelles; the two long, slender arms drawn through the shoulders, through the slenderly massive torso (with the full slenderness of Buddha images) as if made of a single piece, long hammered out in the workshop, down to the wrists, upon which the hands then assumed their poses, agile and independent, like actors on the stage.
And what hands: Buddha hands that know how to sleep, that lie down smoothly after all has passed, with fingers adjoining, to rest for centuries at the edge of a lap, lying with the palms facing up, or else steeply raised at the wrist, invoking infinite stillness.
These hands in wakefulness: imagine.
These fingers spread, open, starlike, or curved in upon each other as in a rose of Jericho; these fingers delighted and happy or else frightened, displaying at the very end of the long arms: themselves dancing.
And the whole body is used to keep this outermost dancing balanced: in the air, in its own atmosphere, in the gold of an Eastern aura.
Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke
There is more information on the impression they made on Rodin on the Rodin Museum site (click the images to zoom in and see more detailed descriptions and quotes from Rodin).
The work
This letter is a wonderful illustrations of ever-present fluid mutual influences between art forms and cultures. The ancient culture of movement, translated into drawings by Rodin, and then both of them re-enacted in Rilke’s words.
SEEING PRACTICE: RODIN
The most remarkable aspect of these drawings is Rodin’s ability to drop all details to re-enact movements of the dancers. He said to Georges Bourdon (in an article for the newspaper Le Figaro on August 1, 1906):
… if they are beautiful, it is because they have a natural way of producing the right movements…
Do you see how the minimalistic simplicity of these drawings allows Rodin to represent a movement? Can you feel this movement inside your own body?